This is very true. Be that as it may, some of it comes down to implementation. IT/Facilities needs to prepare the meeting room in such away to reduce user frustration and need the multitude of options to ensure they have the flexibility to support whatever comes their way. I believe there is a shortage in products suited "plug and play" style environments, or at the very least lack of research in the purchase process. It's all about having the right tool for the job.

The windshield wiper sounds like a cost cutting measure from General Motors. My Mazdas (and many Fords, naturally) have all had the wiper controls on the right stick and lighting on the left.

Well, that's great. Like we didn't already have enough trouble with our economy. It's going to be a hard sell keeping business in the US when all of the Milky Way and possibly humanity is doomed in 4 billion years. What does President Obama intend to do about this?

You'll definitely want to investigate an MDM solution to help manage this deployment from a device/user management, security and incident response perspective. Having said that, I know Samsung (Samsung SAFE), Motorola, 3LM (middleware) and HTC (HTC Pro - not the same as HTC * Pro devices) all have proprietary MDM frameworks added onto Android in specific phones. These will let you control things like encryption a bit better than Android out of the box. I can't answer to encrypted text messages or phone calls though. Without coming off as a shill, I'd recommend investigating solutions from Good Technologies, AirWatch, and MaaS360. Those products meet different needs, but they all do what they do very well.

Regardless of preference, I've found that the framework Apple has lain for MDM is miles ahead of anything Android related. Right now, OEMs are trying to fill the niche Google should be addressing by providing proprietary MDM frameworks. The one huge gripe I have with Apple from a management/deployment point of view is their stance on things like business iTunes accounts, purchasing, etc. I'm sorry, but VPP is not an answer. When employees leave, the company doesn't get those licenses back. It's just a glorified gift card. There's also that whole issue with their terms of service for an Apple account stating that it must be for personal use only, yet they require an Apple ID for MDM certs.

Every time I watch that movie, I criticize myself for thinking that humanity is heading that direction. 'Oh, that's just arrogance or short-sightedness on your part,' I'll think. In spite of this, I always return to this notion that Idiocracy is not terribly far from my vision of the future, but with more masculinity and far less clinical than I imagine the future will be. I wanted to mod you funny instead of insightful - I wanted to.

Waiting for it to reboot? I'm still running spinning disk on a Phenom II X4 system and it takes maybe two minutes at most to get to the desktop and finish login processes (Kaspersky is a different story). Turn it on and take a poop or something. Watching that Windows flag just makes you perceive it taking longer. Now, I'll go ahead and leave my work laptop with full disk encryption out of this. *That* is painful.

It has been some years since I have toyed with it, but you may wish to investigate ClearOS. It seemed to meet all your requirements, though whether they want something on-prem or hosted will make a difference, I'm sure. But to go along with some of these other commenters - if the users prefer Microsoft, it may be worth the money.

I thought all third party apps were restricted from running in desktop mode in WinRT. In fact, I believe that every application has to use approved APIs and such... WinRT is supposed to be a walled garden, not unlike that found in iOS.

Frankly, I'm stereotyping.